Commentaries and Links

To begin with it might be an idea to get a working understanding
of Psychoanalysis and its role in the Humanities and Social Sciences.Apart from the background readings and the
primary texts available at the above website you will also find links to papers
I’ve written for teaching purposes.

Something Other than Mastery, Something
Completely Other (“Freud’s Legacy” 318)

Still with the problematic of self-reference, we now
broaden our horizons.This week we have
broadened them to include the horizon itself.And of course that is where we began anyway—so
nearly there, nearly there where we already are.You remember we began with language and
speech acts, moved on to perception and memory in general (and thoughts), and
now, for our third major division of the course, we move on to the great
institutions and their legacies.But
wait, we’re only reading Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.This is just one institution, and pretty
peculiar one at that.Perhaps
psychoanalysis will become for us the exemplary institution because it
is so peculiar.By locating—in its own
self-referential paradoxes—the possibilities and impossibilities of its own
institutional authority and mastery—psychoanalysis will perhaps have
exhibited the limits and possibilities of all institutions whatsoever.And by discussing psycho-analysis we
are discussing just analysis.

Still with the problem of
self-reference

Psychoanalysis can be read
along side those moments when language refers to itself, consciousness becomes conscious
of itself and vision sees (or attempts to see) visibility itself.In each of those cases the paradox reveals a
simple law.The condition of possibility
for a faculty, an experience, or an action cannot be comprehended within the
system of that faculty, experience or action itself.You cannot “see” visibility.You cannot simply be conscious of —i.e., in
the presence of—your consciousness.You
cannot name a name or take a concept as a concept (once you make a concept into
an object it is no longer a concept, etc.).Your signifier is always also a signified and your signified is never
more than just another signifier.You
cannot, without losing either coherence or clarity, make statements about the
statement you are making, unless you (which automatically happens
anyway) occupy a system outside that which gives meaning to the statement
itself.Example: when the Cretan claims
his statements are false he is caught (and so are we) in the self-reflexive
paradox.We can solve this only by
constructing a sentence in the third person—all his statements are
false.What this implies is that we need
to locate the truth of his statement in a language that is independent of his
own—a metalanguage.A metalanguage, however, is founded on its own
most basic possibilities of self-reference and—oops—no objective grounds for
truth (sometimes people link these phenomena to the “uncertainty principle” of
modern sub-atomic particle physics; to clarify why, I have provided a short
account at the end of this handout).

So psychoanalysis—in its
founding gesture—can be put up alongside those other moments of
self-reference.In psychoanalysis an
analyst acts as a third party in what is called the transference.The human psyche is composed of a small
element of consciousness, on one hand, and a whole tangle of obscure
determinations (the unconscious) on the other.The analyst—through conversations with the analysand who rests on the now canonical couch—can help to
construct an experiential (spatial and temporal) dimension (the regular
appointed hour or so in the analyst’s room) that by transference allows
the playing out or acting out or performance of the
unconscious relations and significations that are causing distress on the
obscure unconscious level.What is it
that gives the analyst the authority and power to control the scene of analysis
and to justify the interpretations that are necessary to loosen up the neurotic
illnesses?Well, the analyst must first
of all have gone through his or her own thorough and complete
analysis.In other words—every analyst
must first of all have been an analysand.So who is the first analyst (there you are,
it’s an origin question)?Answer:
Sigmund Freud.Freud is remarkable then
amongst the institution of psychoanalysis because he is the only analyst never
to have had a prior analyst.Psychoanalysis thus begins with its own self-analysis.It is this fact that, as you will have
discovered, provokes Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure
Principle in which the whole problematic of founding is, literally this
time, played out.Now notice that
Derrida is not simply criticizing Freud (although he is having a
wonderful time with the absurdities that constantly mark
this peculiar yet authoritative text).Derrida is doing something that all good literary critics should by now
have become expert in.He is reading
the text.And his reading exploits every
demonstrable and demonstrably justified resource that readings must
acknowledge as their basic responsibility.In other words, Derrida is putting Freud’s account (his cience, his speculation, his commentary, etc.,) into the
perspective of its own performance, its own playing and acting out.Here we begin to see that the transference
that the institution of psychoanalysis locks away into the private working
spaces of its practice actually takes place and works itself out in its own
documents—the moments of naiveté, blindness, and self-confidence that it must
not acknowledge in order to maintain its own practice.In other words the analyst might attempt to
remove himself from the scene but is nonetheless inscribed as a component
participant.So the good reason for not
just criticizing Freud and junking psychoanalysis as a kind of quackery founded
on false premises (which is common especially among the so called “social
sciences”) would be that in his own rigor and perseverance he albeit
unconsciously reveals the conditions which no institution could escape.And apparently more objective institutions
and disciplines might always be all the more blind to these conditions
in their self-identifying aims of objectivity.

On the way, of course, we have two
wonderful examples of the sheer brilliance of the texts of our own legacy
bringing us to our own self-founding as inheritors of a history and its
institutions that we did not found (and sometimes did not even find).Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle
reads like a montage of early twentieth century discourses—its literary,
speculative and scientific resources somehow usurp their own authority by their
being mixed.But perhaps the peculiarity
of this text lies in its main topic: repetition.Repetition simultaneously makes its mastery
possible while eluding mastery.Derrida’s text is mostly concerned with revealing, exploiting, and
performing the effects of repetition on mastery.And his affirmation, as always, would be
towards a responsibility that is not, nor ever could be, a form of mastery, but
in its coming-up-against authorities is ideally placed to expose the violence
of their mystical foundation.

The drive for pleasure

The notion of drive (both verb and
noun) is closely related in psychoanalytic theory to the notion of instinct.But the use of the term drive helps to
get away from certain tendencies that view instinctual responses as
fundamentally somatic or biological.Freud distinguishes between instinct (German: Instinkt)
and drive (German: Trieb) in the following
way:

An instinct (Trieb)
appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic,
as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the
organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind
for work in consequence of its connection with the body.(Instincts and their
Vicissitudes).

The separation of body and mind
in representation, memory, symbol or signifier is thus a function of
drive.A drive is an instinct in so far
as it is attached to an idea and manifested as an affective state (or feeling).In traditional views the instinct—e.g., the
sexual instinct—was characterized by an inbuilt object, aim and function
(member of the opposite sex, coitus, reproduction).It is now well known that Sigmund Freud’s
refutation of this assumption led to his notion of polymorphous perversity,
that is, aimless heterogeneous drives that pursue only pleasure for its own
sake.What then is pleasure?An idea or image,
in its repeatability as a signifier (the image of the breast for an infant),
thus becomes pleasurable or distressing in its own right.The repeatability of signifying marks puts
the pleasures of the body in touch with social systems of signification.

For Freud, the
drive for pleasure had a simple aim in the reduction of what he called Unlust or “unpleasure.”The
infant is driven by its responses to
stimulation, which it experiences as pain or at least discomfort.In an early formulation he makes a well-known
theoretical distinction between the pleasure
and the reality principles.The pleasure principle aims for immediate
gratification.The reality principle
gradually involves the internalisation of a delaying
mechanism that gradually lessens the need.The reality principle is a kind of survival mechanism. What Freud calls
the primary processes produce a kind
of discharge that is dangerous if unchecked and so secondary processes, like repression, delay, and deferral, put
obstacles in its way.

Primary ProcessesSecondary
Processes

PleasureReality

DisplacementRepression

CondensationDetour/delay

Immediate
gratificationDeferral
of Gratification

Uncertainty

The uncertainty principle explains why measurable qualities are subject
to a minimum of unpredictable fluctuation and thus “fuzziness” in their
values.Quantities are associated in
incompatible pairs, e.g., position and momentum.So the degree of uncertainty in the
measurement of momentum added to the degree of uncertainty in the measurement
of position can never be less than what is called "Planck's constant"
(a universal constant).According to the
principle, then, the more accurate your measurement of position of a particle
then the more unpredictable will be your grasp of its momentum.The same applies with the pair energy and
time, as well as with other pairs of qualities.

In some cases, this is equivalent to saying that in order to reduce the
uncertainty in time or position you require very large energy and
momentum.The reason that this principle
only comes to light in quantum physics is that in order to explore the very,
very small intervals of time and space on the subatomic level, a physicist need
very, very large particle generators, thus increasing the level of energy and
momentum.The principle—though not in a
way that you'd normally notice—applies throughout the physical universe.Which means that this
irreducible uncertainty level has caused a complete rethink of Newtonian laws
and even relativity.